Virginia Woolf Quotes
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And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.
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Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.
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While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace.
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Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?
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No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes
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Young women... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays by Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse?
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But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles.
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But Sasha who after all had no English blood in her but was from Russia where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and sentences often left unfinished from doubt as to how best to end them.
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Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
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My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.
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Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.
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At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.
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It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.
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A light here required a shadow there.
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As I grow old I hate the writing of letters more and more, and like getting them better and better.
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If the best of one's feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is left us?
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I will go down with my colours flying.
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How can I express the darkness?
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I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.
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What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise, and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself- a voice answering a voice.
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The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.
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No one would think of bringing a dog into church. For though a dog is all very well on a gravel path, and shows no disrespect to flowers, the way he wanders down an aisle, looking, lifting a paw, and approaching a pillar with a purpose that makes the blood run cold with horror ... a dog destroys the service completely.
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When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument.
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On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.